“Drag Path” Instagram Reel Pitch Deck
WRD 309: Persuasion in the Age of TikTok
Spring 2026
Instagram Reel:
Pitch Deck:
Connections to the Social Contract
Upon the assignment of our final project, I knew I wanted to post a “Drag Path” reel. “Drag Path”, referring to the song by Twenty One Pilots, is a trend on Instagram primed for social commentary. Since its popularization, the song has been used in two primary ways: to offer digital safe spaces to grieve loss, and to promote social, usually conservationist, change. “Drag Path” is an incredibly potent song, and while the lyrics were originally written to address mental health, they are versatile enough to be applied to a myriad of different rhetorical situations.
For my “Drag Path” reel, I decided to stay close to home and promote the conservation of the Florida Panther, an endangered big cat whose population has been severely reduced due to overdevelopment of highways (causing road-related deaths) and housing in Florida. This social media post works as a rendition of the original conservationist “Drag Path” reel, which features a puffer fish; it’s a cheeky play on how puffer fish make patterns in the sand to attract mates (quite literally, a drag path). Similar to this reel’s use of wordplay, I chose the Florida Panthers after considering the lyric “I dug my heels into the gravel”, which more sinisterly alludes to the fact that panthers contend with gravel highways that cut into their territory. These micro-level cause-and-effect relationships between humans and panthers, as well as the Everglades as a whole, allude to the broken social contract between man and nature. My paper aims to connect the concept of a social contract to the relationship between the natural and human world, and provide a rhetorical analysis of the affordances of the reel created and how they lend themselves to rhetorical listening and empathy.
Conceptually, a social contract dictates that humans live together peacefully without enacting a state of war, a state of “enmity and destruction” that vouches for the egoist’s “right to destroy that which threatens me with destruction” (Locke, 1690). To supersede this state of nature in which war persists, a social contract must be made amongst individuals to combine interests and live under a common ruler. To some, like Hobbes, this is a leviathan, a single, all-powerful ruler that can wield his subjects as he so pleases. Other theorists, like Locke or Hobbes, believe that a sovereign is a governmental body with several moving parts. Regardless of what type of ruler jurisdicts these contracts, when the common individual enters a social contract, they must sacrifice their freedom to enjoy the benefits of living in a society.
As it pertains to environmental conservation, we see this same paradigm extended to the social contract connecting humanity and nature. Just as a traditional social contract requires humans to sacrifice freedom for protection, a social contract with nature requires humans to sacrifice the pursuit of expansion for environmental conservation and the enjoyment of protected lands, national parks, clean air, clear waters, and bountiful animal populations, like the Florida panther. And yet, there is a distinct dissonance between a traditional social contract and one with nature in the attitudes it creates. In a traditional social contract, there is a unanimous push to join and conform to society. The same cannot be said about a social contract with nature, making discourse around the subject paramount.
The reason for this can be discerned by answering Locke’s question from his “Second Treatise of Government”, which asks, “IF man in the state of nature be so free… why will he part with his freedom? why will he give up this empire, and subject himself to the dominion and controul of any other power?” (Locke, 1690). While a traditional social contract answers this question with the promise of peace, unity, and protection of property, a social contract with nature answers this more ambiguously; outside the obvious of enjoying the natural world, the benefits of entering a social contract with nature are not exactly clear. Environmentalists throw around buzzwords like conservation, ozone layer preservation, and climate change, but to non-scientists, these concepts feel intangible and abstract, and must contend with the Hobbesian view that “there is no way for any man to secure himselfe, so reasonable, as Anticipation; that is, by force, or wiles, to master the persons of all men he can… there be some, that taking pleasure in contemplating their own power in the acts of conquest, which they pursue farther than their security requires” (Hobbes, 1651). Unfortunately, to many, the merits of a healthy environment do not feel like they are worth reaping when compared to the benefits of remaining in a state of war: continued human expansion and resource acquisition. This is visually represented in my “Drag Path” reel by showing clips of deforestation, a caged Florida panther, and the development of highways in the Everglades, three ways in which the social contract has been broken.
In connection to Instagram, as McLuhan famously states, “the medium is the message”, which is exactly why I chose to create a “Drag Path” reel to elucidate audiences about the Everglades. Just as Sean Illing connects this Sesame Street’s medium to the message that “education and entertainment are bound up with each other”, My Drag Path reel on Instagram communicates the message that this social contract is worth investing in, and this is done in a very visual manner by showing idealized photos and videos of what the Everglades should look like, cute baby panther cubs, and so on (Illing, 2022).
Furthering how a social contract differs from a traditional social contract, there is a clear lack of exigent fear that creates a push to flee a state of nature. According to Locke, “however free, is full of fears and continual dangers”, as in a state of nature, humans are forced to contest other humans for “property”, or “the lives, liberties, and estates” of other humans (Locke, 1690). In a social contract with nature, humans do not have to contend with nature. There is no fear of nature fighting back against us, as we are unquestionably the apex predators on planet Earth. With no apparent danger of backlash and many trivializing the benefits that nature can give us, humans often opt to remain in a state of nature, where these lands can continue to be divvied up amongst developers, and animals can continue to be poached and killed for meat or for sport. There is an important emphasis on apparent danger. There are very real consequences for not upholding our social contract with nature: polluting our waterways, degrading our oxygen quality, and raising climate temperatures through the use of fossil fuels. Because there is no local benefit to joining this social contract (something that impacts our day-to-day lives), these ramifications seem abstract, especially as I write this from my clean apartment in a first-world country that doesn’t immediately see these consequences like a third-world country would. The concept of a push-pull effect that traditional social theorists like Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau tout as the reason for entering a social contract is lost. Some humans don’t see (or, for some, simply don’t care about) the criticality of environmental protection, and there is no external force pushing us to care about it either. My “Drag Path” reel attempts to remind viewers that there are very real consequences for not entering this social contract that are often forgotten.
Finally, hopelessness has permeated the climate of conservation movements that carry this social contract. For many of us, we see online the irreparable damage being caused to our ecosystems, but feel unable to make a difference because this social contract does not just consider individuals, but also corporations. When a tanker ship sinks and creates a massive oil spill in our oceans, or a celebrity flies their private jet between state lines instead of driving, it can feel trite to use a reusable bag when buying groceries or abstaining from plastic straws at a restaurant. Locke’s social contract calls for sovereigns to “govern by promulgated established laws, not to be varied in particular cases, but to have one rule for rich and poor”, but it often feels like conservation falls on the shoulders of the common individual, while the rich and famous get a pass (Locke, 1690). Narrowing this even further, it can feel meaningless to try to focus conservation efforts on one species, like the Florida panther. It feels like too often, species are becoming endangered and going extinct. With animal populations slipping through our fingers, how does anyone know where to start?
According to Ratcliffe, we should start with rhetorical listening, a concept that “requires listening to people and ideas with which we do not agree” (Ratcliffe, 1999). In the context of environmentalism, this can be as simple as acknowledging what can be done to protect the environment, or seeing out arguments for why the Everglades and panther populations are under attack in the first place. It’s difficult to do so, but important if we want action to be taken. In a similar vein, rhetorical empathy is defined by Blankenship as “a choice and habit of mind that invents and invites discourse informed by deep listening and its resulting emotion, characterized by narratives based on personal experience.” (Blankenship, 2019). This empathy encourages us to listen and sympathize with the other side. As we learned in class, this empathy must be shared amongst “individuals of similar social rank” in order to have true sway (Poncin-Reeves, 2026). In other words, attempting to sway the billionaire in her private jet might be a fool’s errand, but we can create change amongst ourselves.
My “Drag Path” reel intends to do just that by inviting viewers to adopt rhetorical empathy for not just the conservationalists looking to protect the Everglades, but the affected panthers themselves. This “Drag Path” reel is intended to be posted on Instagram, and the audience is individuals who might be unaware of conservation efforts in the Everglades, specifically Florida natives who can most closely benefit from conservation and can help environmentalists by geographically locating panthers if they happen upon one in the wild. As rhetorical empathy asks us to do, this reel takes the stance of a conservationist and attempts to show non-conservationists the importance of protecting the Everglades and what they stand to lose. This stance does not attempt to distinguish between left and right politics, but rather the broken social contract between man and nature. This is the entire meaning of the “Drag Path” trend: to make humans feel for animals and their plights as they reckon with technological advancement. This is done through a variety of affordances.
For example, the first set of clips positions itself as the speaker and invites the viewer to rejoin a social contract where nature does not have to contend against humanity. While we have not abandoned this social contract entirely (there are still conservationist efforts), it has been subverted; we see this through clips of deforestation, a caged Florida panther, and the development of highways in the Everglades. Similarly, in the middle of the reel, during a moment of the instrumental track, we are introduced to Carlton Ward, a photographer with National Geographic. In a moment of wonder, he whispers, “I can’t believe it. I’m staring at a Florida panther”. This type of attitude shifts the tone of the reel from negative to positive, and for the rest of the reel, the viewer sees clips of lush Everglades and resurging panther populations. These affordances aim to develop rhetorical empathy within the viewer through a very visual mode, inviting them to step into the natural world and experience territory infringement as a panther does.
Overall, my “Drag Path” reel attempts to foster rhetorical empathy by inviting viewers to get a glimpse into the work of conservationalists and the lives of affected panthers, reminding individuals who may not be educated on environmental issues that there is a whole world of nature out there, one that we ought to protect. This is done in a way that helps remind individuals that we are all included in a social contract with nature, whether we’re aware of this contract or not, and provides the resources necessary to educate oneself on ways to help strengthen the social contract by linking users to conservationists’ profiles. This social contract asks us to give up our rights to expansion to preserve environmental cornerstones, such as the Everglades and its inhabitants.
References
Hobbes, T. (1631). LEVIATHAN. PROJECT GUTENBERG.
Locke, J. (1690). Second treatise of government. The Project Gutenberg eBook of Second Treatise Of Government, by John Locke. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/7370/7370-h/7370-h.htm
Ratcliffe, K. (1999). “Rhetorical listening: A trope for interpretive invention and a ‘code of
cross-cultural conduct’,” College Composition and Communication, volume 51, number 2, pp. 195–224.
doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/359039, accessed 25 January 2018
Blankenship, L. (2019). Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy. University Press
of Colorado. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvr43mnt
Poncin-Reeves, M. (2026). How to Change Minds [Google Slides]. D2L.
Klein, E., & Illing, S. (Hosts). (2022). The Mid-Century Media Theorists Who Saw What Was
Coming. “The Ezra Klein Show”.
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